Nursing Homes

What is a Nursing Home?

A Nursing Home, also known as a Skilled Nursing Facility or SNF, have Registered Nurses who help provide 24-hour care to people who can no longer care for themselves due to physical, emotional, or mental conditions. A licensed physician supervises each patient’s care and a nurse or other medical professional is almost always on the premises. Most nursing homes have two basic types of services: skilled medical care and custodial care.

Skilled medical care includes services of trained professionals that are needed for a limited period of time following an injury or illness and Custodial or personal care includes assistance with what are known as the activities of daily living, such as: dressing, bathing, eating, toileting, etc.

What type of residents benefits most from skilled nursing facilities?
About 91% of the 1,650,000 US nursing home residents are over the age of 65. Most are in care because of physical needs that require help from the nurses, aides or physical therapists on a nursing home staff. These residents may suffer from a wide array of physical or mental disorders or they may simply be feeble and unable to move about, bath themselves or provide their own meals.

Many of these nursing home residents are considered long-term care patients – they will never recover or stabilize to the point where they can take care of themselves and go back home. These people will either die in a nursing home or be discharged to a hospital where they will die or return to a nursing home or hospice to die. For every 100 elderly patients in a nursing home in a given year, 35 will die and another 37 will be admitted to a hospital where they may die, recover or return. The average stay for elderly patients who die in a nursing home is just shy of 2 years.